Paul Biegler

Does the success of IS recruiting highlight the spiritual emptiness of Western capitalism, or does it exploit the fact that, but for the brakes of civilisation, there is a killer in all of us? The answer is that it does both.

It recommends widening the reach of control orders, including tracking devices, to children as young as 14 and making it easier for police to detain suspects under preventative detention orders (PDOs).

If enacted the new laws may impart the warm glow that comes from doing something, a glow with increased political capital as the inquest into the death of radicalised teen Numan Haider winds up.

But laws won't erase radical beliefs, which psychology increasingly shows stem from a root and branch malaise that Islamic State is leveraging to the hilt.

Wood's reply was swift: the key strategy is just to remind budding jihadists of the numbing drudgery of their lives in Birmingham, East London or (insert bland suburban locale here).

"Do you want to go to your fish and chip shop and watch a football game, is that the most you're going to see out of life? Or do you want this incredibly meaning-rich environment where you're in an apocalyptic battle?" Wood says.

Apocalypse seems to be getting the edge.

A 2014 ICM poll found one in six French citizens held favourable attitudes towards IS, a figure that increased to one in four in the 18-24-year-old bracket.

Could life in the West really be that bad? After all, doesn't most of the developing world aspire to our wrap-around plasma TVs, technicolour trainers, and suburban assault vehicles?

The reality is that while we've been bathing in the sun of material surfeit another commodity has drifted into icy deficit.

Stocks of personal meaning and significance are in critical decline and IS has been only too happy to step in and meet demand.

Stocks of personal meaning and significance are in critical decline and IS has been only too happy to step in and meet demand.

Professor Arie Kruglanski, senior researcher at the National Centre for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, has done studies on extremist persuasion across Muslim countries from Morocco to the Philippines and Indonesia.

"All of them converged on the arousing of a quest for significance," Kruglanski says.

Kruglanski's research also maps how a significance deficit beats a direct path to the door of extremism.

In a soon to be published study, Americans who rated their lives less successful were more likely to think children should be raised to serve the nation or a religion rather than chase personal success.

"If you lose significance you feel humiliated and weakened and this provides an impetus to join a group because there is power in numbers, in belonging to an entity greater than yourself," says Kruglanski.

And in a chilling footnote that addresses one of the key IS selection criteria, Kruglanski found people primed with a group mentality were more willing to die for a cause than people primed with a self-focus.

Now it might be tempting to see a chink of redemption for jihadists in the knowledge they are driven by moral righteousness.

But there is bad news here too, especially for Freudians.

Freud saw a brute simmering below the surface in all of us, only kept from wreaking mayhem by the slender reins of society.

Kruglanski's take is that IS looses the bridle by offering testosterone-fuelled youth the closely entwined rewards of sex, killing and power.

"There is a killer in all of us, but civilisation puts brakes on these primordial tendencies," he says.

Islamic State is pulling on two levers, call them good and evil if you like, but they both accelerate the shift from tentative ideology to sacred belief.

And it is all fuelled by our ubiquitous bias – psychologists call it "motivated reasoning" – to believe things that make us feel good, even in the face of solid counter evidence.

"The motivation to feel significant biases the perception of ideology that promises you significance," says Kruglanski.

The Svengalis at IS exploit this in their blockbuster propaganda videos, cherry-picked examples of Western corruption and narratives of grievance trailed across social media.

And the rub is that once these beliefs crystallise it's a whole world of work to chisel them out.

In 2012 neuroeconomist Professor Gregory Berns decided to test just how gnarly some beliefs are – by paying people to ditch them.

If you liked dogs he offered you real moolah to sign a document saying you were a cat person, and if you believed in God you could get cash for autographing an atheist confessional.

It cost more to part people from their God beliefs than their dog beliefs – no surprises there (unless you're a dog person).

But Berns was scanning brains too, and found something that might interest lawmakers.

Reflecting on dog beliefs lit up an area active when we weigh up the costs and benefits of actions.

But pondering God beliefs lit up a different zone altogether: the one linked to moral rules that are unmoved by the carrot and stick of reward and punishment.

The lesson is that when a 14-year old takes on IS as a sacred cause the threat of a control order will hover at the very edge of their thinking.

And when a PDO expires, radical beliefs, in all likelihood, will not.

The relative impotence of the law was on plain view in an impassioned plea by Scott Atran, a co-author on the Berns study, to the UN Security Council last April.

"Sacred values must be fought with other sacred values," said Atran.

And while sacred causes may be in short supply in the spiritually depleted West the federal government did home in on one in its anti-radicalisation pamphlet, released last September.

It featured the case study of "Karen", a teenager moved to environmental activism by the plight of Australian forests.

Alas, and to social media derision, Karen's forest frolics were not lauded as a virtuous substrate for youthful angst but branded as violent extremism alongside examples of Islamist terrorism.